PAUL'S CASE

A STUDY IN TEMPERAMENT

BYWILLA SIBERT CATHER*

I

IT was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburg High School
to
account for his various misdemeanors. He had been suspended a week ago, and his father
had called at the principal's office and confessed his perplexity
about his son. Paul entered the faculty room, suave and smiling. His clothes were
a trifle outgrown,
and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but, for
all that,
there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly
knotted black
four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his buttonhole. This latter adornment the faculty
somehow felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit
befitting a boy under the ban of suspension.

Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a narrow
chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy,
and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of
way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large, as though he
were addicted
to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter about them which that drug does not
produce.

When questioned by the principal as to why he was there, Paul stated, politely enough,
that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie, but Paul was quite accustomed
to
lying—found it, indeed, indispensible for overcoming
friction. His teachers were asked to state their respective charges,
which they did with such a rancour and aggrievedness as evinced that this was not
a usual case.
Disorder and impertinence were among the offences named, yet each
of his instructors felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause
of the trouble,
which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the boy's; in the contempt which
they all knew
he felt for them, and which he seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once,
when he had been
making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacher had stepped
to his side and
attempted to guide his hand. Paul had started back with a shudder, and thrust his
hands
violently behind him. The astonished woman could scarcely have been more
hurt and embarrassed had he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary
and definitely personal as to be unforgettable. In one way and another he had made
all his teachers,
men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of physical aversion.

His teachers felt, this afternoon, that his whole attitude was symbolized by his shrug
and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell upon him without mercy. He
stood through it,
smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips were continually twitching,
and he had
a habit of raising his eyebrows that was contemptuous and irritating
to the last degree.) Older boys than Paul had broken down and shed tears under that
baptism of fire,
but his set smile did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort
was the nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of his overcoat,
and an occasional
jerking of the other hand that held his hat. Paul was always smiling, always glancing
about him, seeming to feel that people might be watching him and trying to detect
something. This conscious expression, since it was as far as possible from boyish
mirthfulness, was

* Author of "The Troll Garden," a book of short stories, in which this is included.

As the inquisition proceeded, one of his instructors repeated an impertinent remark
of
the boy's, and the principal asked him whether he thought that a courteous speech
to have
made a woman. Paul shrugged his shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.

"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite, or impolite,
either. I guess it's a sort of way I have of saying things, regardless."

The principal, who was a sympathetic man, asked him whether he didn't think that a
way
it would be well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said he guessed so. When he was told
that
he could go, he bowed gracefully and went out. His bow was
but a repetition of the scandalous red carnation.

His teachers were in despair, and his drawing-master voiced the feeling of them all
when he declared there was something about the boy which none of them understood.
He
added: "I don't really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence;
there's something sort of haunted about it. The boy is not strong, for one thing.
I
happen to know that he was born in Colorado, only a few months
before his mother died out there of a long illness. There is something
wrong about the fellow."

The drawing-master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one saw only his
white
teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm afternoon the boy had gone to
sleep
at his drawing-board, and his master had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined
face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching
even
in his sleep, and stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from his teeth.

As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the soldiers' chorus
from "Faust," looking wildly behind him, now and then, to see whether some
of his teachers were not there to writhe under his light-heartedness. As it was now
late
in the afternoon, and Paul was on duty that evening as usher in Carnegie Hall, he
decided
that he would not go home to supper, but would hang about an Oakland
tobacconist's shop until it was time to go to the concert hall.

When Paul reached the ushers' dressing-room at about half-past seven that evening,
half a dozen boys were there already, and Paul began, excitedly, to tumble into his
uniform.
It was one of the few that at all approached fitting, and he thought it very becoming,
though
he knew that the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow chest, about which he
was
exceedingly sensitive. He was always considerably excited while he dressed, twanging
all over to the tuning of the strings and the preliminary flourishes of the horns
in the music-room; but to-night he seemed quite beside himself, and he
teased and plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down
on the floor
and sat on him.

Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of the house to seat
the early comers.

He was a model usher; gracious and smiling, he ran up and down the aisles; nothing
was
too much trouble for him; he carried messages and brought programs as though it were
his
greatest pleasure in life, and all the people in his section thought him a charming
boy,
feeling that he remembered and admired them. As the house filled, he grew more and
more
vivacious and animated, and the color came to his cheeks and lips. It was very much
as though
this were a great reception, and Paul were the host.

When the symphony began, Paul sank into one of the rear seats, with a long sigh of
relief. It was not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul,
but the
first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious and potent spirit within
him—
something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman.
He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall
blazed
into unimaginable splendor. When the soprano soloist came on, Paul half closed his
eyes, and gave
himself up to the peculiar stimulus such personages always had for him. The soloist
chanced to
be a German woman, by no means in her first youth and the mother of many children;
but she wore
an elaborate gown and a tiara, and above all, she had that indefinable air of achievement,
that
world-shine upon her, which, in Paul's eyes, made her a veritable queen of romance.

After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and wretched until he got to sleep,
and to-night he was even more than usually restless. He had the feeling of not being
able
to let down, of its being impossible to give up this delicious
excitement which was the only thing that could be called living
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at all. During the last number he withdrew, and, after hastily changing his clothes
in the
dressing-room, slipped out to the side door where the soprano's carriage stood. Here
he began
pacing rapidly up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.

Over yonder the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square through the
fine
rain, the windows of its twelve stories glowing like those of a lighted cardboard
house
under a Christmas tree. All the actors and singers of the better class
stayed there when they were in the city, and a number of the big
manufacturers of the place lived there in the winter. Paul had often hung about the
hotel, watching
the people go in and out, longing to enter and leave school-masters and dull care
behind him forever.

At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor who helped her into her
carriage and closed the door with a cordial auf wiedersehen, which set Paul
to wondering whether she were not an old sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage
over
to the hotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when the singer
alighted and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors that were opened by a negro
in a
tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that the door was ajar, it seemed to Paul
that he
too entered. He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted
building, into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and
basking ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were
brought into the dining-room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen
them in the
supper-party pictures of the Sunday World
supplement. A quick gust of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and
Paul was
startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel driveway; that
his boots
were letting in the water, and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet about him; that
the lights
in front of the concert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in sheets between
him
and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what he wanted—tangibly
before
him, like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime, but mocking spirits stood guard
at the doors,
and, as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to
shiver in the
black night outside, looking up at it.

He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to come sometime;
his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs, explanations that did not
explain, hastily improvised fictions that were forever tripping him up, his upstairs
room
and its horrible yellow wall-paper, the creaking bureau with the
greasy plush collar box and over his painted wooden bed the pictures
of George Washington and John Calvin, and the framed motto, "Feed my
Lambs," which had been worked in red worsted by his mother.

Half an hour later, Paul alighted from his car and went slowly down one of the side
streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a highly respectable street, where all the
houses were exactly alike, and where business men of moderate means begot and reared
large
families of children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shorter
catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly alike as
their
homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they lived. Paul never went up Cordelia
Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next to the
house of the Cumberland minister. He approached it to-night with the nerveless sense
of defeat,
the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he
always had when
he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above
his
head. After each of these orgies of living, he experienced all the physical depression
which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house
penetrated by kitchen odors; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless,
colorless mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights
and fresh flowers.

The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul felt to the sight
of it all; his ugly sleeping chamber, the cold bath-room, with the grimy zinc tub,
the
cracked mirror, the dripping spigots, his father at the top of the stairs, his hairy
legs sticking out from his night-shirt, his feet thrust into carpet slippers. He was
so
much later than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paul
stopped
short before the door. He felt that he could not be accosted by his father to-night,
that
he could not toss again on that miserable bed. He would not go in. He would tell his
father that he had no car fare, and it was raining so hard he had gone home with one
of
the boys and stayed all night.

Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the house and tried
one
of the basement windows, found it open, raised it cautiously, and scrambled down the
cellar wall to the floor. There he stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise
he
had made, but the floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs.
He
found a soap box, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that streamed from
the
furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of rats, so he did not try to sleep,
but sat looking distrustfully at the dark, still terrified least he might have awakened
his
father. In such reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights
out of
the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened,
Paul's head was always singularly clear. Suppose his father had heard him getting
in at the window,
and come down and shot him for a burglar? Then, again, suppose
his father had come down, pistol in hand, and he had cried out in time to save himself,
and his
father had been horrified to think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose
a day should
come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been no warning
cry to stay his
hand? With this last supposition Paul entertained himself until daybreak.

The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken by
the last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go to church and Sabbath-school,
as always.
On seasonable Sunday afternoons the burghers of Cordelia Street always
sat out on their front "stoops," and talked to their neighbors on the next stoop,
or called to
those across the street in neighborly fashion. The men usually sat on gay cushions
placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in their Sunday
"waists," sat
in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending to be greatly at their ease. The children
played in the
streets; there were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds
of a kindergarten. The men on the steps—all in their shirt sleeves,
their vests unbuttoned—sat with their legs well apart, their stomachs comfortably
protruding,
and talked of the prices of things, or told anecdotes of the sagacity of their various
chiefs
and overlords. They occasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children,
listened
affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see their own proclivities
reproduced
in their offspring, and interspersed their legends of the iron kings with remarks
about their sons'
progress at school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in
their toy banks.

On this last Sunday of November, Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest step of
his
"stoop," staring into the street, while his sisters, in their rockers, were talking
to
the minister's daughters next door about how many shirt-waists they had made in the
last week,
and how many waffles some one had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather
was warm,
and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls made lemonade,
which
was always brought out in a red glass pitcher, ornamented with forget-me-nots in blue
enamel.
This the girls thought very fine, and the neighbors always joked about the suspicious
color
of the pitcher.

To-day Paul's father sat on the top step, talking to a young man who shifted a restless
baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the young man who was daily held up to Paul
as a
model, and after whom it was his father's dearest hope that he would pattern.
This young man was of a ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth,
and faded, near-sighted eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows
that curved about his
ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel corporation, and was looked
upon in Cordelia
Street as a young man with a future. There was a story that, some five years ago—he
was now barely
twenty-six—he had been a trifle dissipated, but in order to curb his appetites and
save the loss
of time and strength that a sowing of wild oats might have entailed, he had taken
his chief's advice,
oft reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one, had married the first woman
whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to be an angular schoolmistress,
much older
than he, who also wore thick glasses, and who had now borne him four children, all
near-sighted, like herself.

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the Mediterranean, kept
in touch with
all the details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht
just as though he were at home, and "knocking off work enough to keep two
stenographers busy." His father told, in turn, the plan his corporation
was considering, of putting
View Image of Page 78
in an electric railway plant at Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful apprehension
that they might spoil it all before he got there. Yet he rather liked to hear these
legends
of the iron kings, that were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories
of palaces in Venice,
yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy, and
he was interested in the triumphs of these cash-boys who had become famous, though
he
had no mind for the cash-boy stage.

After supper was over, and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul nervously asked his
father whether he could go to George's to get some help in his geometry, and still
more
nervously asked for car fare. This latter request he had to repeat, as his father,
on
principle, did not like to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked
Paul
whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that he ought not
to
leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him the dime. He was not a poor man,
but
he had a worthy ambition to come up in the world. His only reason for allowing Paul
to
usher was, that he thought a boy ought to be earning a little.

Paul bounded up-stairs, scrubbed the greasy odor of the dish-water from his hands
with
the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over his fingers a few drops of violet
water from the bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his geometry
conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out
of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening
days,
and began to live again.

The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one of the downtown
theatres was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the boy had been invited to drop in at
the
Sunday-night rehearsals whenever he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every
available moment loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had won a place
among
Edwards's following, not only because the young actor, who could not afford to employ
a
dresser, often found the boy very useful, but because he recognized in Paul something
akin to what
Churchmen term 'vocation.'

It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but
a
sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement
of a secret love. The moment he inhaled
the gassy, painty, dusty odor behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free,
and felt
within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid, brilliant, poetic things.
The moment the
cracked orchestra beat out the overture from "Martha", or jerked at the serenade from
"Rigoletto,"
all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his senses were deliciously, yet delicately
fired.

Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore the guise
of
ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed
to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life elsewhere
was so
full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice
as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odors of cooking,
that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad men and women so attractive,
that he was
so moved by these starry apple orchards that bloomed perennially under the lime-light.

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the stage entrance
of
that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance. Certainly none of the company
ever
suspected it, least of all Charley Edwards. It was very like the
old stories that used to float about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean
halls there; with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps, and richly appareled women
who never
saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled city,
enamored
of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit
of blue-and-white
Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.

Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been perverted by
garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever read at all. The books at
home
were not such as would either tempt or corrupt a youthful mind,
and as for reading the novels that some of his friends urged upon him—well, he got
what
he wanted much more quickly from music; any sort of music, from an
orchestra to a barrel-organ. He needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that
made his
imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures
enough of his own. It was equally true that he was not stage-struck—not, at any rate,
in the
usual acceptation of that
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expression. He had no desire to become an actor, any more than he had to become a
musician.
He felt no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in
the atmosphere,
float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after blue league, away from
everything.

After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the school-room more than ever repulsive:
the bare floors and naked walls, the prosy men who never wore frock-coats, or violets
in
their button-holes; the women with their dull gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness
about prepositions that govern the dative. He could not bear to have the other pupils
think, for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them that
he
considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a jest, anyway. He had autograph
pictures of all the members of the stock company, which he showed his classmates,
telling
them the most incredible stories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance
with the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and the flowers
he sent
them. When these stories lost their effect, and his audience grew listless,
he became desperate and would bid all the boys good-night, announcing that he was
going to travel for
a while, going to Naples, to Venice, to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back,
conscious,
and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he should have to defer his voyage
until spring.

Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his instructors
know how heartily he despised them and their homilies, and how thoroughly he was
appreciated elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to fool with
theorems; adding, with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch of that
nervous bravado which so perplexed them, that he was helping the people
down at the stock company; they were old friends of his.

The upshot of the matter was, that the principal went to Paul's father, and Paul was
taken out of school and put to work. The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get
another
usher in his stead, the doorkeeper at the theatre was warned not to admit him to the
house, and Charley Edwards remorsefully promised the boy's
father not to see him again.

The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul's stories reached
them—especially the women. They were hard-working women, most of them supporting
indigent husbands or brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at having stirred
the boy
to such fervid and florid inventions. They agreed with the faculty
and with his father that Paul's was a bad case.

II

The east-bound train was plowing through a January snow-storm; the dull dawn was
beginning to show gray, when the engine whistled a mile out of Newark. Paul started
up from
the seat where he had lain curled in uneasy slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window-glass
with his hand, and peered out. The snow was whirling in curling eddies
above the white bottom-lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along
the fences,
while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks protruded black above
it. Lights
shone from the scattered houses, and a gang of laborers who stood beside
the track waved their lanterns.

Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He had made the
all-night journey in a day coach, partly because he was ashamed, dressed as he was,
to go
into a Pullman, and partly because he was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburg
business man, who might have noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle
awoke him, he clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an uncertain
smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the slatternly
women
across the aisle were in open-mouthed oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies
were
for the nonce stilled. Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he
could.

When he arrived at the Jersey City station, Paul hurried through
his breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him. After he
reached the
Twenty-third Street station, he consulted a cabman, and had himself driven to a men's
furnishing establishment that was just opening for the day. He spent upward of two
hours
there, buying with endless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put
on in
the fitting-room; the frock-coat and dress-clothes he had bundled into the cab with
his
linen. Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe house. His next errand was at Tiffany's,
where he selected his silver and a new scarf-pin. He would not wait to have his silver
marked,
View Image of Page 80
he said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway, and had his purchases packed
into
various traveling bags.

It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and after settling
with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from Washington; said his mother
and
father had been abroad, and that he had come down to await the arrival of their steamer.
He told his story plausibly and had no trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them
in
advance, in engaging his rooms, a sleeping-room, sitting-room and bath.

Not once, but a hundred times, Paul had planned this entry into New York. He had gone
over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in his scrap-book at home there
were
pages of description about New York hotels, cut from the Sunday papers. When he was
shown
to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a glance that everything was as
it
should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that
the place did not realize, so he rang for the bell-boy and sent him down for flowers.
He moved
about nervously until the boy returned, putting away his new linen
and fingering it delightedly as he did so. When the flowers came, he put them hastily
into water,
and then tumbled into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his white bath-room, resplendent
in his new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red robe.
The snow was whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely see across
the street
but within the air was deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils
on the taboret
beside the couch, and threw himself down, with a long sigh, covering himself with
a Roman blanket.
He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste, had stood up to such a strain,
covered so
much ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all
come about. Lulled
by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of the flowers, he
sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.

It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre and concert
hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually determined.
The rest was a mere matter of opportunity. The only thing that at all surprised him
was his
own courage, for he realized well enough that he had always been tormented
by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as the meshes of the lies
he had told
closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter. Until
now,
he could not remember the time when he had not been dreading something. Even when
he was a
little boy, it was always there—behind him, or before, or on either side. There had
always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but
from
which something seemed always to be watching him—and Paul had done things that were
not pretty to watch, he knew.

But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown down the
gauntlet to the thing in the corner.

Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but yesterday afternoon
that he had been sent to the bank with Denny & Carson's deposits as usual—but
this time he was instructed to leave the book to be balanced. There were above two
thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the bank-notes which he had taken
from the
book and quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a new deposit
slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his returning to the office,
where he had finished his work and asked for a full day's holiday tomorrow, Saturday,
giving a perfectly reasonable pretext. The bank-book, he knew, would not be returned
before Monday or Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From
the time he slipped the bank-notes into his pocket until he boarded the night train
for New York, he had not known a moment's hesitation.
It was not the first time Paul had steered through treacherous waters.

How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done, and this time
there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the stairs. He watched the snow-flakes
whirling by his window until he fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with a start;
half
of one of his precious days gone already! He spent more than an hour in dressing,
watching
every stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror. Everything was quite perfect;
he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be.

When he went down-stairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth Avenue toward the
Park. The snow had somewhat abated, carriages and tradesmen's wagons were
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hurrying to and fro in the winter twilight, boys in woollen mufflers were shovelling
off the doorsteps, the avenue stages made fine spots of color against the white street.
Here and there on the corners were stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under
glass
cases, against the sides of which the snow-flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses,
carnations, lilies of the valley, somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they
blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stage winter-piece.

When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the
tune of the streets had changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamed from
the hotels that reared
their dozen stories fearlessly up into the storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds.
A long,
black stream of carriages poured down the avenue, intersected here and there by other
streams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the entrance
of his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were running in and out of
the awning that was
stretched across the sidewalk, up and down the red velvet carpet laid from the door
to the street.
Above, about, within it all was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of thousands
of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on every side of him towered the
glaring affirmation
of the omnipotence of wealth.

The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm
of realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff
of all sensations
was whirling about him like the snow-flakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.

When Paul went down to dinner, the music of the orchestra came floating up the elevator
shaft to greet him. His head whirled as he stepped into the thronged corridor, and
he sank
back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The lights, the chatter,
the perfumes, the bewildering medley of color—he had for a moment the feeling of
not being able to stand it. But only for a moment; these were his own people, he told
himself. He went slowly about the corridors, through the writing-rooms, smoking-rooms,
reception-rooms, as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace,
built
and peopled for him alone.

When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. The flowers,
the
white linen, the many-colored wine glasses, the gay toilettes of the women, the low
popping of corks, the undulating repetitions of the "Blue Danube" from the orchestra,
all flooded Paul's dream with bewildering radiance. When the rosy tinge of his
champagne was added—that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in
his glass—Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all. This was what
all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this was what all the struggle was about.
He
doubted the reality of his past. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street,
a place
where fagged-looking business men got on the early car; mere rivets
in a machine, they seemed to Paul—sickening men, with combings of children's hair
always hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their clothes. Cordelia
Street—Ah! that
belonged to another time and country; had he not always been thus, had he not sat
here
night after night, from as far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just
such
shimmering textures and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one between
his
thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.

He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or to
know
any of these people; all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch
the
pageant. The mere stage properties were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later
in
the evening, in his loge at the Metropolitan. He was now entirely rid
of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the
imperative desire to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that
his surroundings
explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it passively. He
had only
to glance down at his attire to reassure himself that here it would be impossible
for anyone
to humiliate him.

He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that night, and
sat
long watching the raging storm from his turret window. When he went to sleep, it was
with
the lights turned on in his bedroom; partly because of his old timidity and partly
so
that, if he should wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt,
no
horrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvin above his bed.

Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfasted late, and
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in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale, who
said he had
run down for a "little flyer" over Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the
night side of
the town, and the two boys went out together after dinner, not returning to the hotel
until seven
o'clock the next morning. They had started out in the confiding warmth of a champagne
friendship, but their parting in the elevator was singularly cool. The
freshman pulled himself together to make his train and Paul went to bed.
He awoke at two o'clock in the afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water,
coffee, and
the Pittsburg papers.

On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There was this to
be
said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in no way made himself conspicuous.
Even under the glow of his wine he was never boisterous, though he found the stuff
like a
magician's wand for wonder-building. His chief greediness lay in his ears and eyes,
and
his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the gray winter twilights
in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan,
his
cigarette, and his sense of power. He could not remember a time when he had felt so
at
peace with himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty
lying, lying every day and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied
for pleasure,
even at school, but to be noticed and admired, to assert his difference from other
Cordelia
Street boys; and he felt a good deal more manly, more honest even, now that he had
no need for
boastful pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends
used to say, "dress the part." It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to
him. His
golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he could.

On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole affair exploited
in
the Pittsburg papers, exploited with a wealth of detail which indicated that local
news
of a sensational nature was at a low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced
that the boy's father had refunded the full amount of the theft, and that they had
no intention of
prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and expressed his hope
of
yet reclaiming the motherless boy, and his Sabbath-school teacher declared that she
would
spare no effort to that end. The rumor had reached Pittsburg that the boy had been
seen
in a New York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him and bring him home.

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak to the knees,
and
clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters
of
Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever. The gray monotony stretched
before him in hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting,
the
yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him with a sickening
vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking
sensation that the play was over. The sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang to
his
feet, looked about him with his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the
mirror. With something of the old childish belief in miracles with which he had so
often
gone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed whistling down the
corridor to the elevator.

He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music than
his
remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting
with it, and finding it all-sufficient. The glare and
glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again, and for the last time, their
old potency. He would show himself that he was game, he would finish the thing splendidly.
He doubted, more than ever, the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time
he
drank his wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of those fortunate beings born
to
the purple, was he not still himself and in his own place? He drummed a nervous accompaniment
to the Pagliacci music and looked about him, telling himself over and over that it
had paid.

He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music and the chill sweetness of his wine,
that he might have done it more wisely. He might have caught an outbound steamer and
been
well out of their clutches before now. But the other side of the world had seemed
too far
away and too uncertain then; he could not have waited for it; his need had been too
sharp.
If he had to choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow.
He looked affectionately about the dining-room, now gilded with a soft mist. Ah, it
had paid
indeed!

Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and feet. He had
thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and had slept with his shoes on.
His
limbs and hands were lead heavy, and his tongue and throat were parched and burnt.
There
came upon him one of those fateful attacks of clear-headedness that never occurred
except
when he was physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose.
He lay still and closed his eyes and let the tide of things wash over him.

His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other," he told
himself. The memory of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon him like a
weight
of black water. He had not a hundred dollars left; and he knew now, more than ever,
that
money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed and all he wanted.
The
thing was winding itself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New
York,
and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his dressing-table now;
he had
got it out last night when he came blindly up from dinner, but the shiny metal hurt
his
eyes, and he disliked the looks of the thing.

He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again to attacks
of
nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the world
had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow, he was not afraid of anything,
was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the dark corner at last and
knew. It was
bad enough, what he saw there, but somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been.
He saw everything
clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he had lived the
sort of life he was meant
to live, and for half an hour he sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself
that was
not the way, so he went down stairs and took a cab to the ferry.

When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab, directing
the
driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town. The snow lay heavy on the
roadways and had drifted deep in the open fields. Only here and there the dead grass
or
dried weed stalks projected, singularly black, above it. Once
well into the country, Paul dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the
tracks,
his mind a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual picture
of
everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every feature of both his drivers,
of the toothless
old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom
he had got
his ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope
with
vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly at sorting
and grouping these images. They made for him a part of the ugliness of the world,
of the ache in his head,
and the bitter burning on his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his
mouth
as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little hillside, where
the
tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him, he stopped and sat down.

The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed, their red glory
all
over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that
first
night must have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one splendid breath
they
had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass, and it was a
losing
game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is
run.
Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and scooped
a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up. Then he dozed a while, from his
weak condition, seemingly
insensible to the cold.

The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started to his feet, remembering
only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late. He stood watching the
approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn
away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced
nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right
moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless
clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone.
There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water,
the
yellow of Algerian sands.

He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through
the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed.
Then, because the picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed
into
black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.